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MONTREAL—In Toronto it is an unprecedented political development. In Quebec these days, it seems almost routine.

City hall watchers peering over the mayor-less municipal cliff today may want to take a look east — to a province where two scandal-plagued cities have lost leaders this month, while a third mayor facing criminal charges stubbornly holds onto power.

There are considerable differences, of course. Rob Ford was ordered out of office by an Ontario judge over the improper use of city stationery to solicit charitable donations from lobbyists — and then participating in discussion and a vote on whether he had to obey the integrity commissioner’s directive to repay the money. He can appeal the ruling and intends to do so.

The unproven allegations of kickbacks, corruption and rigged municipal contracts central to the resignations of Montreal’s Gerald Tremblay and Laval’s Gilles Vaillancourt prompted mass outrage and, in Vaillancourt’s case, an apparently massive police investigation. Both made it nearly impossible for the two mayors to carry out their duties.

What happens in Toronto now? If the Quebec cases are any indication, headline writers will be hard at work searching for new alternatives to the words “political crisis” for the multitude of reports that are sure to come.

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There will be more court hearings. There will be campaign launches for those looking to replace Ford. There will certainly be many volleys in the war of words between Toronto’s outspoken mayor and his political opponents.

But those Toronto residents more interested in the state of their sidewalks, downtown traffic and swimming pool schedules probably won’t see much difference.

“When you have a snowstorm, it will be cleared out of the streets and cleaned up. Twice a week the garbage will be picked up. Recreational activities will continue to be held. The city will continue to hand out parking tickets,” said Pierre-Yves Melançon, author of the 2009 book La politique municipale pour tous (Municipal Politics for All).

“The city continues.”

The most obvious damage so far in Montreal and Laval has been to the municipal political parties that Tremblay and Vaillancourt led. They foundered when the mayors fled.

In both cases it fell to city councillors to select a replacement mayor who would serve until the next scheduled municipal elections in November 2013. The job of the interim mayor is more than that of a simple placeholder and flagbearer. Michael Applebaum, who served as Tremblay’s No. 2 but quit the party as he jockeyed to win the support of his council colleagues for the temporary top post, must now see through an overhaul of the budget that was introduced days before Tremblay left office.

The original draft included a tax hike of 3.3 per cent and all-too-sensitive comparisons with the alleged kickbacks that Union Montreal demanded from construction firms interested in winning infrastructure contracts in recent years. One of Applebaum’s chief promises in the campaign to fill the Tremblay vacuum was to cut the tax hike to 2.2 per cent, equal to the annual increase in the cost of living.

If Ford is true to his pledge to “fight tooth and nail to hold on to my job,” Torontonians might have on their hands a situation similar to the 42,000 residents of Mascouche, Quebec, said Jean-Pierre Collin, a professor of local politics and history at Montreal’s L’Institut national de la recherché scientifique.

He has essentially gone underground ever since, all the while refusing to give up his post and vowing to stay on until his term expires next year.

The Quebec government has no laws allowing it to remove a mayor from office unless he or she is convicted of a crime, and the pitchforks and torches that await Marcotte at each council meeting have had little effect on the mayor’s thinking.

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